As we enter the summer months, lenders are facing a complicated lending and regulatory environment. Despite states beginning to reopen, many borrowers and lending staff are choosing to maintain social distancing. As a result, more states are permitting Remote Online Notarizations (RON) in the absence of Federal guidelines.
Our compliance team is hard at work monitoring any developments at the federal and state level to provide you with the information and tools necessary to continue operations amid COVID-19. We are seeing updates at both the state and national level to accommodate difficulties in this time and are working continuously to ensure our guidance reflects the latest news.
March was a tumultuous month for all of us, as everyone across industries and even continents attempted to establish a new normal amid the COVID-19 outbreak.
February brought the first major regulatory changes with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac rolling out new the ARM regulations alluded to late last year. The GSEs announced plans for the gradual elimination (and replacement) of their ARM programs, which use LIBOR as the index for setting the adjustable interest rate. We have been working quickly to update documents but expect to see more changes and will alert you as more information becomes available.
This month’s changes were geared mainly toward document updates. In this post, you’ll find links to some of the work our experts were engaged in last month to keep our clients up to date and fully compliant. We bring you all the news in this month’s compliance update.
How can mortgage lenders best navigate the fine line between reducing the risk of lending to highly leveraged borrowers and making homeownership available to more people? Over the decades, the pendulum has swung between tight lending standards that are safer (but more restrictive) and looser standards intended to help first-time homebuyers, lower income borrowers, or those with student loan debt.
November was a relatively quiet month on the rules side, with only a couple of states making any changes of note. However, Fannie Mae is previewing its plans for early 2020, and between URLA and new ARM products, we expect to see several significant new regulations in the first quarter of the year. November was busy on the document update side, however.
MBA’s annual convention is the largest and most content-packed mortgage industry conferences of the year. This year’s event in Austin, Texas, was no exception.
For those of you who may have missed the conference, key themes were eClosing and the increasing the acceptance of eNotes, economic trends and secondary market issues.
September was a relatively quiet month from a rulemaking perspective. Only one state made changes to its regulations during the month that went beyond document changes. We saw nothing new from government agencies or investors.
We did make a few changes to our document library in September. Details are below. Remember that you will always be up to date, up to the minute, by following the posts in our compliance blog.
